I began web development way back in the days of GeoCities. I just wanted to change the color of something, if I recall. That sparked immediate joy, and I never looked back! I created a moderately popular fan page, then in college I went on to learn Flash on my own time, and worked for the Natural Sciences and Mathematics Department part time, creating an animation of a character named Professor Nat and his pet frog named Turtle.

In college, I switched from Computer Science to Political Science. If I could do it all over again, I don't think I'd have made that switch.

In 2005, I had an incredible opportunity to go study Spanish in Costa Rica for a month of total immersion. I lived with a family there, and we traveled to the coast or the mountains each weekend. I road a horse past a live volcano to a waterfall in the forest, and I'll never forget that experience. It was something out of a novel.

After graduating, I made some websites freelance, and then finally found a job continuing to do Flash animations with a small company of one man. We built that company up to 5 employees, and over one hundred clients. The main product is a map-based real estate search engine for Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. In that time I learned responsive design, JavaScript, CSS 3.0 and SQL. Plus, with some of our clients using bulletin boards built on PHP, I was introduced to that language as well.

While we've worked mainly in VB.net for the past 11+ years, I have been learning C# MVC in my own time. I am proficient with UX design and development, especially using jQuery and coding my own server side functions and SQL to build AJAX based web applications.

I began my new job with IBM in April, working on the IBM Z community project! It's very exciting!

I'm excited for what the future will bring me, and I'm passionate about learning new coding techniques and languages!